Establishing New Team Processes

Once the team and their goals and incentives have been established, the next step is to think through how you want the team to work. That is, what processes will shape how the team gets its collective job done? Teams vary strikingly in how they handle meetings, make decisions, resolve conflict, and divide responsibilities and tasks . You will probably want to introduce new ways of doing things. But take care not to plunge into this task precipitously. First, familiarize yourself thoroughly with how your team worked before your arrival, and how effective its processes were. That way, you can preserve what worked well and change what did not.

Assess Your Team s Existing Processes

How can you get a handle on your team s existing processes quickly? Talk to team members and support staff, and to your new boss or your predecessor. Get them to brief you on their functions and walk you through the key processes. Read meeting minutes and team reports . Probe for answers to the following questions:

• Participants roles. Who influenced your predecessor most? Who played devil s advocate? Who was the innovator? Who avoided uncertainty? To whom did everyone else listen most attentively? Who was the peacemaker? The rabble-rouser?

• Team meetings. How often did your team meet? Who participated? Who set the agendas for meetings?

• Decision making. Who made what kinds of decisions? Who was consulted on decisions? Who was told once decisions were made?

• Leadership style. What leadership style did your predecessor prefer? That is, how did he or she prefer to learn, communicate, motivate, and handle decisions? How does your predecessor s leadership style compare with yours? If your styles differ markedly, how will you address the likely impact of those differences on your team?

Target Processes for Change

Once you grasp how your team functioned in the past ”and what did and did not work well ”it is time to use what you have learned and establish the new processes you judge necessary. Many leaders decide, for example, that their team s meeting and decision-making processes would benefit from revision. If this is true of you, begin spelling out in specific terms what changes you envision. How often will the team meet? Who will attend which meetings? How will agendas be established and circulated? Setting up clear and effective processes will help your team coalesce and secure some early wins as a group .

Altering Who Participates

One common team process problem ”and a great opportunity to send a message that change is coming ”concerns who participates in core team meetings. In some organizations, key meetings are too inclusive, with too many people participating in discussions and decision making. If this is the case, then move rapidly to reduce the size of the core group and streamline the meetings, sending the message that you value efficiency and focus. In other organizations, key meetings are too exclusive, with people with potentially important opinions and information being systematically excluded. If this is the case, then rapidly move to judiciously broaden participation, sending the message that you will not be playing favorites or listening to just a few points of view.

Managing Decision Making

Decision making is another fertile area for potential improvement. Few team leaders do a good job of managing decision making. In part, this is because different types of decisions call for different decision-making processes; most team leaders stick with one approach. They do this because they have a style with which they are comfortable and because they believe they need to be consistent or risk confusing their direct reports.

Research I ve done in collaboration with my colleagues Amy Edmondson and Mike Roberto suggests that this is wrongheaded. ^[1] The key is to have a framework for understanding and communicating why different decisions will be approached in different ways.

Think of the different ways that teams can make decisions. As pictured in figure 7-3, possible approaches can be arrayed on a spectrum ranging from unilateral decision making at one end to unanimous consent at the other. In unilateral decision making, the leader simply makes the call, either without consultation or with limited consultation with personal advisers. The risks associated with this approach are obvious: You may miss critical information and insights and get only lukewarm support for implementation.

Figure 7-3: Group Decision-Making Spectrum

At the other extreme, processes that require unanimous consent from more than a few people tend to suffer from decision diffusion . They go on and on, never reaching closure. Or, if a decision does get made, it is often a lowest -common-denominator compromise. In either case, critical opportunities and threats are not addressed effectively.

Between these two extremes are the decision-making processes that most leaders use: consult -and-decide and build consensus . When a leader solicits information and advice from direct reports ”individually or as a group, or both ”but reserves the right to make the final call, he or she is using a consult-and-decide approach. In effect he or she separates the information gathering and analysis process from the evaluating and reaching closure process, harnessing the group for one but not the other.

In the build-consensus process, the leader both seeks information and analysis and seeks buy-in from the group for any decision. The goal is not full consensus but sufficient consensus. This means that a critical mass of the group believes the decision to be the right one and, critically, that the rest agree that they can live with and support implementation of the decision.

When should you choose one process over the other? The answer is emphatically not If I am under time pressure, I will use consult-and-decide. Why? Because although it may be true that you reach a decision quicker by the consult-and-decide route, you won t necessarily reach the desired outcome faster. In fact, you may end up consuming a lot of time trying to sell the decision after the fact, or finding out that people are not energetically implementing it and having to pressure them. Those who suffer from the action imperative are most at risk of this; they want to reach closure by making the call, but may jeopardize their end goals in the process.

The following rules of thumb can help you figure out which decision-making process to use:

• If the decision is likely to be highly divisive ”creating winners and losers ”then you usually are better off using consult-and-decide and taking the heat. A build-consensus process will both fail to reach a good outcome and get everyone mad at one another in the process. Put another way, decisions about sharing losses or pain among a group of people are best made by the leader.

• If the decision requires energetic support for implementation from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you usually are better off using a build-consensus process. You may get to a decision more quickly using consult-and-decide, but not to the desired outcome.

• If you are managing a team of people who are relatively inexperienced, then you usually are better off relying more on consult-and-decide until you have taken the measure of the team and developed their capabilities. If you try to adopt a build-consensus approach with an inexperienced team, you risk getting frustrated and imposing a decision anyway, which effectively undercuts teamwork.

• If you are put in charge of a group of people with whom you need to establish your authority (such as supervising former peers), then you are better off relying on consult-and-decide to make some key early decisions. You can relax and rely more on building consensus once people see that you have the steadiness and insight to make tough calls.

Your approach to decision making will also vary depending on which of the ST _A RS situations you are in. Start-ups and turnarounds are situations in which consult-and-decide often works well. The problems tend to be technical (markets, products, technologies) rather than cultural and political in nature. Also, people may be hungry for strong leadership, which often is associated with a consult-and-decide style. To be effective in realignment and sustaining -success situations, by contrast, leaders often need to deal with strong intact teams and to confront cultural and political issues. These sorts of issues are typically best addressed with the build-consensus approach.

To alter your approach to decision making depending on the nature of the decision to be made, you will sometimes have to restrain your natural inclinations. You are likely to have a preference for either consult-and-decide or build-consensus decision making. But preferences are not destiny. If you are a consult and-decide person, you should consider experimenting with building (sufficient) consensus in suitable situations. If you are a build-consensus person, you should feel free to adopt a consult-and-decide approach when it is appropriate to do so.

To avoid confusion, consider explaining to your direct reports what process you are going to use and why. More important, strive to run a fair process . ^[2] Even if people do not agree with the final decision, they often will support it if they feel (1) that their views and interests have been heard and taken seriously and (2) that you have given them a plausible rationale for why you made the call you did. The corollary is: Don t engage in a charade of consensus building ”an effort to build support for a decision already made. This rarely fools anyone , creates cynicism, and undercuts implementation. You are better off to simply use consult-and-decide.

Finally, you often can shift between build-consensus and consult-and-decide modes as you gain deeper insight into peoples interests and positions . It may make sense, for example, to begin in a consensus-building mode but reserve the right to shift to consult-and-decide if the process is becoming too divisive. It also may make sense to begin with consult-and-decide and shift to build-consensus if it emerges that energetic implementation is critical and consensus is possible.

^[1] Our work has focused on how the leaders of senior teams can more effectively manage decision making. The first fruits of this collaboration are contained in A. Edmondson, M. Roberto, and M. Watkins, A Dynamic Model of Top Management Team Effectiveness: Managing Unstructured Task Streams, Leadership Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Spring 2003).

^[2] For a discussion of the importance of perception of fairness in process, see W. Chan Kim and Ren e . Mauborgne, Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy, Harvard Business Review, July “August 1997.